News, Interviews, and Miscellanea from the desk of Garrett Calcaterra.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Climate Change Craziness!

Ground zero of BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, 2010

Just a quick update on my recent shenanigans regarding climate change. I had a big, serious (and fairly depressing) article called "Can SciFi Save the World From Climate Change?" get published in Black Gate last week. It's caused a good bit of buzz online, including over at Project Hieroglyph, where I just weighed in. I also wrote a companion piece over at Prose&Cons, a new multi-author blog I'm part of. Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts here, or at any of the above-linked locations.

5 comments:

Nasty weather is natural. It happens someplace nearly all the time and always has. Vivid graphics on TV make it look ominous and omnipresent. Some, in their quest for control over others, falsely blame humans for it.

NATURAL phenomena drove all of the reported average global temperature changes since before 1900. The temperature trend is calculated by a simple equation. The correlation is 95% and uses only two drivers.

CO2 change is not one of them.

Search using key words AGW unveiled to see the simple analysis and discover the drivers.

Prudent application of technology can reduce the impact of nasty weather.

Thanks for your comment, Dan, but I'll politely point out that you're wrong. If you want to talk about the quest for control, one simply needs to follow the money. There's no money in doing scientific research on climate change. There is, however, $27 trillion in fossil fuel reserves ready to be dug up and sold to the public by the fossil fuel industry. Which do you suppose has a greater motive to mislead the public?

As to the issue of you presenting yourself as a scientist and writing scientific analyses of historical climate data, more power to you, but I ain't buying it until you get it published in a proper, peer-reviewed scientific journal. Until then...

Broad science skill allows one to challenge the ‘science’ and ‘peer review’ as possibly being just more propaganda towards a political agenda. Unfortunately, IMO, much of ‘peer review’ of papers on climate science has morphed into an academic club approving each other’s work. Biased peer review is de facto censoring.

Correlations are just correlations. They speak nothing of cause and effect. For your consideration, here's a few other 95% correlations to take a gander at: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kjh2110/the-10-most-bizarre-correlations.

I do, however, appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism and taking a broad view of all issues, particularly something as complex as climate change. While, I'm not a scientist, I do have a science education and stay well read on the topic. Based on what I've seen, there's no doubt in my mind that human activity is causing rapid climate change. Furthermore, I see no motive for scientists to purposely mislead or misinterpret data.

The link didn't work, but I found the article anyway. I'm fully aware of nonsense correlations. If you look through my stuff you should grasp the basis for the assertions and find that my correlation is not nonsense.

The discovery by Svante Arrhenius more than a century ago was that CO2 absorbs electromagnetic energy (EMR). Later, it was determined that CO2 absorbs EMR at wavelengths in the range 14-16 microns which is within the wavelengths of significant EMR from the planet in the range of about 5 to 100 microns.

The Arrhenius equation was included in an earlier version of my equation as shown in equation (1) at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html . The analysis there showed that CO2 change was not a climate driver because there was no significant change in the coefficient of determination, R^2 when the CO2 effect was included or not.

Understanding how this can be requires an understanding of the mechanism, on a molecule scale, of what takes place. The mechanism includes thermalization and is described at http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com/ .

The validity of my analysis is demonstrated by 95% correlation with average global temperature measurements since before 1900 and a credible assessment back to 1610.